Bedeviling bug's legacy still haunts the South

The boll weevil infestation had a catastrophic effect on society and helped fuel the great migration of African-Americans from the South to cities including Chicago, where these children and adults are celebrating Catholic Mass in 1942.

Library of Congress

The year 1892, marked on a mausoleum near Jewish Hill in Natchez, Miss., turned out to be a cryptic one as it signaled the year that the boll weevil invaded the United States. The city's Jewish merchant population was wiped out financially when the bug reached the area and wreaked havoc on the economy. Most relocated to bigger cities. Today, fewer than 25 Jews remain in Natchez.

Lance Murphey/The Commercial Appeal

In July 1940, a group of Florida migrants stopped in Shawboro, N.C., on their way to New Jersey. As Census figures show, the arrival of the boll weevil was accompanied by a massive out-migration of the cotton-growing areas. With so many people moving away, the infrastructures of many small towns -- train lines, shops and cotton gins -- collapsed.

Jack Delano/Library of Congress

In 1938, cotton pickers are trucked to fields near Pine Bluff, Ark. They were paid 75 cents to a dollar per day. As tenant farmers left, the day workers were brought from towns to fill the gap.

Russell Lee/Library of Congress

With the boll weevil nibbling away at the South's infrastructure, millions of rural African Americans migrated to cities like Chicago, seen here in April, 1941. Workers moved north looking for opportunities beyond the cotton fields.

Russell Lee/Library of Congress

The Boll Weevil Monument in Enterprise, Ala., looms over costume contest winners Kylie Pandolfi (left), Michael Joreski and Kaitlin Price, who were participating in the town's Boll Weevil Fall Festival. The monument was erected in 1919 to thank the boll weevil for forcing a prosperous shift in the town's economy, from cotton farming to other crops such as peanuts.

Lance Murphey/The Commercial Appeal

In September 1938, cotton pickers in Lehi, Ark., found little prosperity in their labor-intensive work. Knee pads provided scant comfort for hours of kneeling in the dirt. For some, heading north was an easy choice.

Russell Lee/Library of Congress

NATCHEZ, Miss. -- As organ music fills the soaring dome of Temple B'nai Israel, Elise Rushing greets the few worshipers trickling in and speaks of the not-too-distant time when Mississippi's oldest Jewish congregation will cease to exist.

"When there's nobody left to attend services, it (the synagogue) will be a museum. It won't become a movie theater or get left by the wayside," says Rushing, the temple secretary.

This grand, 250-seat synagogue may be a monument to Greek Revival architecture. But the fact that it's nearly empty during services is largely a testament to the power of a tiny, destructive insect.

Two years after the temple's opening in 1905, boll weevils crossed the Mississippi River and unraveled the fabric of Natchez's cotton-based economy. Two-thirds of the town's 450 Jewish residents, many of them prominent merchants, fled to large cities. Today, fewer than 25 remain.

Like a Biblical plague, boll weevils caused economic ruin and mass dislocations as they spread across the Cotton Belt.

Today, the insect is on the verge of being eradicated from the United States through a $2.4 billion program funded largely by farmers.

But the effects of the weevil's invasion still reverberate from small towns and rural areas of the South to urban centers of the North.

Pest led human migration; Farm workers went North

By ravaging cotton crops -- the foundation of the Southern economy -- the weevil dispersed Jewish communities from small towns and helped spur the "Great Migration" of African-Americans to industrial cities in the North. It also left a legacy of chronic poverty in parts of the rural South.

Memphis was profoundly affected. The influx of people driven from farms by weevil-related crop damage, Mississippi River floods and low commodity prices helped nearly double the city's population between 1910 and 1930.

A foreshadowing of the exodus that was to sweep the South came when U.S. Department of Agriculture official Seaman Knapp was sent to Texas in 1903 to deal with the boll weevil with practices that would later form the basis of the Cooperative Extension Service.

Everywhere boll weevils advanced north and east from Texas, cotton harvests were devastated -- dropping by nearly 90 percent in Pike County, Miss., for instance, and 96 percent in Hancock County, Ga.

All told, per-acre yields dropped an average of 31 percent across a five-state region from Louisiana to South Carolina, triggering a much broader economic meltdown.

Nationwide, farm bankruptcies nearly doubled as boll weevil damage peaked. The number of farms in the South owned by African-Americans dropped by more than 10 percent in the early 1920s alone.

"The problem was if you were a small landowner or tenant or a sharecropper with 20 to 40 acres, and you were completely overrun with the weevil, you didn't have a cushion to be able to wait it out," said John Willis, history professor at the University of the South who chronicles much of the strife in "Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War."

Land prices plummeted. In one of many examples, a Savannah, Ga., attorney who owned what had been a lucrative 7,600-acre plantation sold it for a paltry $70,000 in 1919.

"The low price was due to the ravages of the boll weevil, which ended the career of the property as a plantation ...," owner George Noble Jones wrote in a letter describing the property known as El Destino.

Bank failures riddled the countryside. In Mississippi, the number of banks reporting to the state auditor dropped from 342 in June 1911 to 306 three years later.

Gin operators, railroads and merchants also faced ruin.

As Census figures show, the economic disaster was accompanied by a massive out-migration of the cotton-growing areas.

Sharecroppers, most of them black, were among the first to go. In addition to depending on cotton for money for their families, they also owed a "share" of their crops to landowners in exchange for housing and supplies.

Even in the face of threats from landowners who feared they would not be able to replace the cheap labor, many left, often stealing away in the night.

While people fled north, many also fled east, trying to keep ahead of the path of weevil's destruction.

"Many, many people moved, trying to find areas that hadn't been struck," said Willis.

"They soon realized the weevil was hard to outrun, and in many cases, the were probably taking it with them."

Between 1910 and 1930, nearly three dozen Mississippi counties lost population.

Similar hemorrhaging occurred across the Cotton Belt. More than half of South Carolina's counties and almost two-thirds of Georgia's counties lost population during the 1920s.

Although an undetermined number of the fleeing residents went to nearby cities or other farming areas in the South, others joined the larger migration of African-Americans headed North.

Beginning around 1915 and lasting through 1930, nearly 1.5 million African-Americans left the South. Between 1910 and 1920, Mississippi lost 15 percent of its black population, and in the 1920s, the African-American populations of Georgia and South Carolina fell by 26 and 29.5 percent, respectively.

Memphis served as a sort of way-station on the route North.

"This was the first stop for a lot of families," said John Gnuschke, professor of economics and director of the Sparks Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Memphis.

The reasons for their departures, and the role played by the boll weevil, are subjects of disagreement.

Migration brought long-term changes

Some historians argue that especially in the initial years of migration, during World War I, the boll weevil was a minor factor.

They cite better-paying manufacturing jobs, which became open to black workers because the war had shut off the flow of immigrant labor. Another primary motivation was the desire to escape the oppression and violence of the Jim Crow South.

Going north brought African-Americans many benefits in terms of living conditions and personal dignity, said James Grossman, vice president for research and education at Newberry Library in Chicago, who has written extensively about the migration.

"It means cash wages, it means being able to walk through the same door as everyone else. It means not being made to step in the gutter when a white person walks in your direction," he said.

Blaming the boll weevil for the migration, Grossman said, "allowed white Southerners to get themselves off the hook" by saying "it wasn't our oppression, it was an insect."

However, there is considerable evidence that the boll weevil played a large role in black migration, particularly after 1920.

In a 1924 survey of black residents who had just arrived in Philadelphia, more than one-fourth cited the boll weevil as the reason they left the South. No other factor was cited more often.

In addition, the migration rate for black residents tracked closely with extent of crop damage from weevils, according to a study published in 1976 by researcher Robert Higgs.

The two states with the greatest damage -- Georgia and South Carolina -- also had the highest black migration rates.

"During the early 1920s, the boll weevil infestation did constitute a significant push" motivating African-Americans to leave, Higgs wrote.

"They did one of two things -- they either grew sweet potatoes or went to Harlem," he said.

Whatever its varied causes, the migration changed the North and South.

Chicago's black population swelled by an estimated 65,000, while in Philadelphia, the number of African-Americans rose from less than 85,000 to nearly 220,000. Other cities across the North experienced similar effects.

The change in demographics brought long-term shifts in politics, culture and economics.

But there also was a virulent backlash.

Beginning in 1919 and lasting into the 1920s, several cities were gripped by race riots as tensions flared between white residents and the newly arrived African-Americans over jobs, housing and other issues. Not coincidentally, the Ku Klux Klan's power and influence increased sharply.

Following a violent riot in Chicago in 1919, a commission studying the causes explored the origins of the black migration to the city. One of the factors it cited was the boll weevil's "heavy ravages upon the cotton crops."

In contrast to the impacts in the North, the boll weevil's effect haunts the South today. It produced a long-lasting poverty, tied directly to the loss of wealth that larger landholders had been able to hand down through the generations, Willis said.

"In the wake of the land losses, large planters moved in, consolidating their holdings into much larger plantations," he said.

In towns such as Natchez, where planters and merchants built fabulous homes during the 19th century, the weevil's work is etched in a gap in the local architecture.

Because of the economic damage, there were no major homes built from 1907 until around World War II, local historians say.

The popular annual pilgrimage of antebellum homes in Natchez began in large part as an effort to revive the flagging economy.

Like other small towns, including nearby Port Gibson and Woodville, Miss., Natchez also is noteworthy for what it no longer has: a sizeable Jewish community.

Before the boll weevil, Natchez was "very much dominated -- culturally, socially and economically -- by its Jewish citizens," said Mimi Miller, director of preservation and education for the Historic Natchez Foundation.

The residents, most of them prominent merchants, migrated to New Orleans, Memphis and other cities.

"There was a domino effect ... as the farmers lost their crops and lost their means of making a living," said Joan Gandy, another local historian.

"The effects just rippled through the economy. ... We lost population as well as a center of our economy."